The secret head of the WHO is Bill Gates
The most important organization of world health, the WHO, has a problem: it is broke and therefore dependent on donations. Is it losing its independence as a result?
Curbing parasites such as malaria, viruses such as Ebola or bacteria such as the pathogens that cause tuberculosis worldwide, coordinating the global fight against epidemics and improving health care in poor countries - these are gigantic tasks that the World Health Organization, or WHO for short, is to tackle on behalf of the member states of the United Nations. But the most important institution of world health is broke. Because its members do not pay in enough, the WHO needs more and more money from private foundations and industry - and is in danger of losing its independence.
But who exactly influences the highest authority on world health? How? And what needs to change for this to stop? Filmmakers Jutta Pinzler and Tatjana Mischke spent a year researching these questions. The results can be seen in a 90-minute documentary on ARTE on 4 April at 8.15 pm: Die WHO – Im Griff der Lobbyisten?
(The WHO - In the grip of the lobbyists?)
Until the first excitement the spectator has to be patient. It revolves around a question that has been controversially discussed throughout Europe for months: How dangerous is the pesticide glyphosate? And did the company Monsanto, which was the first to market the pesticide in the 1970s, influence the WHO in its assessment of its harmfulness? After all, even after the patent on the pesticide has expired, Monsanto still earns good money by selling it in packages with genetically modified plants - soya or corn, for example - that are resistant to it.
According to the film's authors, various lobby organisations of the genetic engineering industry are said to have paid large sums of money to the WHO in the 1990s. In 1994, the WHO, together with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), raised the limits for glyphosate residues in genetically modified soybeans 200-fold. This, the filmmakers argue, was very much in Monsanto's interest. The filmmakers argue that this was in Monsanto's best interests because it allowed the company to sell more glyphosate and soybeans to match.
Although experts from the company's own International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) assessed it differently, the WHO officially concluded in 2016 that glyphosate was not proven to be carcinogenic. The panel that determined this was comprised of two WHO officials who also worked for a lobbying organization (TIME ONLINE reported), which in turn is said to have received substantial sums from Monsanto. Although the ARTE documentary reopens all of this, it does not really offer new research on the glyphosate case.
Would the WHO get along without Gates' money?
Nevertheless, it is
the entanglements between corporations and the WHO that make the film exciting - and it has more to offer. For example, when David McCoy, one of the leading experts on world health, says that
the WHO's agenda is increasingly determined by private donors, especially Bill Gates. If the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation stopped sending millions of US dollars to Geneva every year, the WHO would possibly collapse. The billionaire has a correspondingly great influence on the content of the programme.
In the film, the spokesman for the foundation denies any influence. But de facto, as the film shows, there is overlap in personnel between the WHO and the Gates Foundation.
And the WHO does indeed concentrate conspicuously strongly on what Bill Gates wants: vaccination, for example.
Now vaccinations are undisputedly an extremely effective form of health care. Polio, for example, has become increasingly rare in recent years thanks to comprehensive vaccination programmes. In 2016, there were only 42 confirmed cases worldwide, compared with 350,000 in 1988. This is just one of many positive examples.
But vaccinations alone do not keep people healthy. Much more important is that a country's health care system functions well and that the environment in which people live does not make them ill - documentation within the WHO puts its finger on this wound. Every day, for example, almost 1,500 people die from contaminated drinking water. Critics say that more lives could be saved with clean water and nutrition programmes than with vaccinations. In truth, both would be necessary.
Even with less costly measures, such as anti-drug campaigns, the WHO has saved many lives in the course of its history. It seems, however, that it is now less involved in such areas. Something that health scientists have been criticizing for some time.
The filmmakers say clearly: This could be due to the Gates Foundation, because it may have other interests. The reason: the foundation invests its money with companies whose actions endanger the health of many people. The more profit these companies make, the more profit there is. The Gates portfolio includes major alcohol and food manufacturers such as Nestlé and the oil company Shell.
The film describes this conflict of interest using the Niger Delta as an example: In 2008, at least 500,000 barrels of oil leaked from two of the company's pipelines. This deprived farmers and fishermen of their livelihoods. The local residents can only live for a few years on the compensation paid by Shell (ZEIT ONLINE reported). But even today large areas are still polluted.
Are the consequences of reactor accidents played down?
And then there is this agreement between the WHO and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which promotes nuclear energy worldwide. According to Pinzler and Mischke, it prevents the United Nations health authority from providing neutral information about the extent to which radioactivity endangers people's health. After the accident at Chernobyl in 1986, the WHO played down the death toll, and even after the earthquake and the tsunami in Fukushima in 2011, the WHO had been conspicuously reticent: WHO officials did not arrive at the site of the accident until days after the reactor disaster. In such cases, an emergency plan is supposed to take effect much earlier, for example by providing for radiation measurements directly after the accident.
Even today, the WHO relies too much on information from the IAEA in the Fukushima case, the film criticizes. In addition, the staff of both organisations overlaps considerably: seven IAEA staff members took part in the WHO report on Fukushima. This does not sound particularly independent.
But it is precisely their independence that has led to the WHO achieving so much in its history, including the eradication of smallpox, the drastic reduction in cases of polio and the worldwide decrease in smoking through strict anti-tobacco regulations. And it is precisely this independence that it now threatens to lose: Whereas in 1970 it received four-fifths of its funding from the member states without being tied to projects, today it receives only one-fifth. The remainder comes from private donors, foundations or from member states that give money voluntarily but are tied to projects. All these donors have different and conflicting interests and want to help shape the global health watchdog agenda. The discussion that Pinzler and Mischke want to initiate must therefore be conducted urgently: How must the WHO change so that it can continue to fulfil its tasks in the future?
There are plenty of proposals: accept only donations where the WHO itself decides what to do with them; adopt statutes that rule out personnel overlaps with institutions such as the IAEA or lobbying organisations, but also the Gates Foundation; do not play any further part in projects such as the Gavi Global Impact Alliance, whose money comes largely from the Gates Foundation and whose board includes pharmaceutical companies. All this would be possible. In order to become more independent again, however, the WHO would need one thing above all: more freely available money from the member states. If they continue to rely on billionaires to do what they are supposed to do, the most important institution in the world of global health could lose its credibility for good.
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